Welcome to Empirical Design

Perspective

I founded Empirical Design in 1993 with the goal of developing leading-edge audio products in accordance with a few time-honored principles:

• Everything matters.
• The simplest solution is usually the best one. (Tip-of-the hat to William of Ockham)
  
• Don't miss the forest for the trees.

I named my company Empirical Design as a succinct statement of my rigorous, observation-based approach to product development. The high-end audio landscape offers abundant diversity; there's no need for another me-too product line. Empirical Design will introduce a new product only when I am confident that it has achieved a level of performance and value unavailable elsewhere in the marketplace.

Priorities

In keeping with my aesthetic preference for simple solutions to technical problems, I avoid boutique parts and unnecessarily complex topologies. Empirical Design products incorporate high quality, cost-effective components in minimalist configurations that deliver standard-setting performance at reasonable prices.

The ultimate goal of a well-designed audio system should be to get out of the way of the music.

Empirical Design products will enhance your ability to selectively attend to individual musical lines (the "trees") without obscuring the rhythmic, harmonic, and formal structure of the composition itself (the "forest").

They will convey the textural and tonal complexities of the most intricate arrangements, or the long flowing melody of a delicate solo, while revealing the subtle expressive nuances of each performer responding to the call of the music, from soft to loud, from high to low.

Thanks for visiting,

Karl Schuster
President